Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  And what we saw surprised us. This, too, sounds callous to put into print, but we realized that even the beggars are economic actors. Even within desperate situations, there are patterns of commerce. There is ingenuity. There is profit. We learned that people with no other choice are often amazingly creative: anywhere a rupee could be made, three people were competing to make that rupee. We discovered that there is such a thing as economic jugaad: improvising a livelihood out of the most unlikely opportunities.

  Like the simple intersection of two streets. What could be a more unlikely location for opportunity to manifest? But this was the case: anywhere anyone was forced to wait, an economy would spring up. Where auto drivers waited for fares, where private drivers waited for bosses, where passengers waited for trains or buses, but especially where cars revved their engines in front of eternal red lights—in all these places, a tide of entrepreneurs rose to transform the transient needs of the impatient into a trickle of rupees that provided a meal for a day, a livelihood for a family, or more: a career, a path out of poverty, a citywide merchandising empire.

  Some red-light economies were small. A minor intersection would be operated upon by a family of beggars or by men selling snacks. They’d wander through the idling cars offering their indulgences or their misfortunes for a few rupees each. But some red-light economies had evolved complex ebbs and flows of commerce that were timed to the fractional duration of the delay. When the light was green, the players in this economy were regrouping, replenishing their stock, readying themselves to wade into the islands of rattling tailpipes the moment the light turned red and the cars begin to pile up. And when the first car rocked to a halt, the well-rehearsed red-light economy churned forth. First came the adult vendors, surging through to offer both practical goods and impulse buys: masala peanuts, belts, model airplanes, mobile phone chargers, orange towels. On some days, every major red light in the city might have someone selling the same suction-cup window shades or sheets of glow-in-the-dark ceiling stickers, making it clear that each red light was connected to a massive underground distribution chain. Jenny and I would watch them pass, tempted by the coconut slices but wary of the water sprinkled to keep them moist, curious about the electric mosquito swatters but unwilling to hold up traffic to complete a negotiation.

  Once the adult vendors had crested, the children began to swell. They’d lean stacks of books against their chests, their chins pressed down against the top one to secure the pile as they speed-waddled over, holding up the covers one by one. These were pirated books—photocopied reproductions of City of Djinns, The White Tiger, The Inscrutable Americans, self-help guides, biographies of prominent businessmen, and various Ghosh and Rushdie titles with the pages pasted out of order and maybe missing whole chapters. A survey of the titles being pirated functioned as a barometer of Delhi’s literary interests in any given month. (If you bought this book off the street, that means it’s a success! Except that bootleggers don’t pay royalties, so we hope the cheap ink rubs off on your cheap fingers.)

  If the children were selling magazines, they were often wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo of the title employing them. It was initially horrifying to see twelve-year-olds working under the hot sun for global brands in an official capacity, but we soon realized that at least they’re earning a living. They should be in school, yes, of course, they should have caring parents who feed them and clothe them and love them and give them a proper childhood. But if they don’t have parents, or homes, or love, at least they have jobs. Because they could have it much worse.

  And in the most highly evolved red-light economies, the next wave makes it clear how much worse it could be.

  Sometimes the beggars were elderly men or women, hobbling over on crutches to stand motionless by our auto with their hands clasped together in that namaste pose westerners learn in yoga class; they’d close their eyes and look serene for a moment before hobbling on to the next one. Sometimes the beggars were dirty young women with hair matted in accidental dreadlocks and unconscious babies flopping like rag dolls; they reached into our auto to touch our feet and gesture at the flies landing on the babies’ leaky noses. Sometimes the beggars were deformed men dangling boneless limbs or walking on all fours like dogs, wearing flip-flops to protect their hands from gravel. Sometimes the beggars were children, pointing to their mouths and their stomachs, crying fake tears that carved real valleys through the dust on their cheeks.

  The children always came last. The order of the red-light economy was probably determined by a number of factors (agreements, bribes, threats, seniority and beatings surely figured in determinations of hierarchy), but it generally resulted in businessmen before beggars, and adults before children. Sometimes the children were actually enjoying themselves, pretending misery but peering at us as they wiped their eyes to see if we were buying it, and then bounding joyfully to the next car if we weren’t. Other times they were genuinely, wretchedly miserable, crying with exhaustion because whoever put them on the street wouldn’t let them quit for the night until they’d earned a certain amount. Sometimes they worked in teams, with a boy beating a drum while a girl, with a black mustache painted on her face, turned a few cartwheels on the pavement before clasping her hands together and bringing them in a full circle around her body (a trick that requires dislocating her shoulders to perform).

  The red-light economy, heart-wrenching and terrible as it can be, was designed that way. Every component was strategically implemented to maximize someone’s profit. This knowledge helped us learn to say “no” to people whose lives we could conceivably change with what we’d spend on dinner that night. Because even the beggars are economic actors, and giving to them only boosts their profitability.

  Still, such knowledge did nothing to make us feel better about it. Children would rush to us barefoot over the hot pavement and pull at our pants legs, sobbing and begging for chapatti and touching our feet and pointing at their empty mouths. And we’d sadly shake our heads and purse our lips in sympathy; or, as difficult as it was, we’d stare in the other direction and pretend not to notice at all. We felt terrible every time, but we knew that any money we gave would just be passed up to whomever forced them onto the street in the first place. A terrible choice that made us hate this country, hate this universe, hate ourselves.

  Every so often, though, a child gave us hope: maybe, just maybe, things weren’t as bad as they appeared. These glimmers came in the moments a child decided our alms were a lost cause. Usually, she would just move on to the next vehicle. But sometimes—and these are the moments we’d cling to—she would straighten up off the auto floor where she’d dramatically collapsed, cease her sobs, and dash merrily back to her siblings who were chasing crows on the traffic island, running that determined gait universal to happy children. Sometimes she’d even run alongside our auto as we accelerated, smiling and waving at the foreigners and charming us into smiling and waving back. Sometimes we could get her to break character as she howled on our auto floor by practising our Hindi on her; she’d snap off a false sob, break into delighted laughter, and wave some other children over to hear us talk. How bad could things be, we’d think—we’d hope, we’d pray—if a beggar child can still show such genuine happiness?

  More of these moments: one little boy used this break to play, taking an object from his pocket and prancing it up and down my leg like a toy dinosaur. One little girl laid her head on Jenny’s leg and looked up at us with big brown eyes, perhaps imagining that she was part of the billboard family smiling over the intersection, or maybe just appreciating this respite from the sun. One time, as we were in a taxi waiting out a light, Jenny opened her window and handed a boy a ten-rupee note. He took it, studied it, studied us, and then stuck his hand in for more. Jenny started to gently roll up the window: sorry, kid, that’s all you get. But the boy called her bluff, keeping his hand in the gap with the full knowledge that she would never close it on him. He spent the duration of the light making the saddest faces
he could at his captive audience: he stuck out his lower lip and made it quiver, he squinted his eyes to make them water, he uttered mewing noises. But when the light changed, the driver revved the engine, and the little boy knew we’d won the stand-off. His face erupted into the most adorable grin we’d ever seen, and he pulled his hand out and ran alongside the car as we picked up speed, shouting and waving and laughing as we did the same.

  In times like these, we’d return to Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods. “In India, things are never as good or as bad as they seem.” We highlighted that quote in our copy of his book. We desperately needed to believe that it was true.

  The profit potential of any red-light economy was limited to the duration of its delay. If Delhi’s vendors and beggars had their way, every red light’s duration would be like the one we had the misfortune to encounter a few hours east of New Delhi. Because at this railroad crossing, the economy had control of the red light.

  We were in Sam Singh’s car, on the way to Anupshahr in Uttar Pradesh, to visit Pardada Pardadi’s school. Sam drives this road two or three times a week, so he knew exactly what’s made this particular railroad crossing so miserable: a cabal of vendors and beggars had collectively bribed some Indian Railways employees to lower the crossing guard far earlier than the passing train required, creating a captive audience of cars that would sit there for twenty minutes out of every hour. On our trip, Sam groaned as he saw the gate begin its descent—had we been two minutes earlier, we would have been spared the next twenty minutes we instead spent staring despairingly down the empty tracks as the tide surged around our car.

  It was orderly in the beginning, with snack vendors tapping politely on our windows, followed by guys selling idols, mobile phone protectors, and other knick-knacks, and then the beggars spilling over us. But as the minutes ticked away and the rumbling of the train grew audible in the distance, the entrepreneurs abandoned decorum to close any last-second sales. Old men on crutches slapped the car doors to get our attention, roasted channa vendors shoved their wares through the cracked windows, and children mashed their faces into the windshield and hollered. When the gate lifted, the vendors and beggars scrambled away, and both directions of traffic surged. In their haste to cross, the lanes were blurred, which created instant head-to-head gridlock that nearly trapped us in another cycle.

  When we made the trip to the school again a few months later, the jam stretched into the hours. We would have expected authorities to take action as the jams grew more and more significant, but the opposite had apparently happened: the longer the jam grew, the more money was being made, and the more the men profiting from it were able to bribe anyone trying to shut it down. We assume that increasing amounts of money were required as increasingly higher authorities became aware of the situation.

  Which provides a good illustration of how we imagine illegal businesses to be operating in Delhi: it’s trickle-up economics. Beggars and belt sellers and sidewalk barbers may not be licensed, but they’re still taxed—first by the police, who demand payment not to enforce the licensing laws; and then by the neighborhood mobsters, who place their hands in the pockets of anyone operating in their territory. Based on what we’ve seen, what we’ve read, and what we’ve been told, we speculate that any space from which someone can sell or beg is controlled by both the police and the local strongmen, and any vendor or beggar who wants to operate there has to come to an agreement with both.

  By this reckoning, money earned by Delhi’s poorest moves inexorably upward into the pockets of those who have power over them. The more money any one person is earning, the higher up the food chain people take notice, and the more he has to pay just to stay in business. Small payments to local thugs aggregate into bigger payments to neighborhood bosses. Small bribes to local cops aggregate into bigger payments to neighborhood constables. At the bottom, the poor struggle to get by; at the top, the rich make enough to become politicians.

  What happens when someone crosses the system? Well, for as long as we lived in Hauz Khas, there was always a guy selling omelettes from a folding table set up between our bungalow and the market. Except, one day, there were suddenly two. Two guys, both selling omelettes from folding tables set up immediately adjacent to each other, both with crates of eggs, gas burners and small plastic containers of pre-diced chillies and herbs. From behind both tables, both men stared directly ahead, neither acknowledging the other even when I attempted to amuse them by rubbing my eyes and miming exaggerated double takes.

  What was happening here? Was this pure ugly capitalism like at those competing kebab stands, or the dueling Roopaks in Karol Bagh? Had the new guy simply seen all the money to be made selling omelettes from this spot and decided he wanted a piece of the action?

  Or—was this how the trickle-up economy enforced compliance? Had the invading egg man been sent by a local mobster to provoke a protection payment, or to drive a too-honest vendor out of business?

  A few days later, one of the two omelette vendors disappeared. Unfortunately, we don’t know if the new guy drove the original out of his livelihood, or if the original egg man got the message and paid his dues. We’d never looked at the original vendor closely enough to recognize which one was the last egg man standing.

  Not every poor person is a beggar, a vendor, or a cog in Delhi’s vast orange towel distribution network. Many people earn their livelihoods using the most basic gifts their gods gave them: backs that can support weight, arms that can operate shovels, wrists that can move in the back-and-forth motion necessary to wield a paintbrush, mouths that can tell someone where an entrance to a mall is along with fingers that can point appropriately, or bodies that merely exist in three-dimensional space and thus can be positioned anywhere there’s something worth guarding. If there’s a pattern, it’s this: anything a machine can do, a person can almost always do cheaper.

  We were inevitably surprised to see new examples of things being done by hand that we’d intrinsically assumed were done by machines. On the roads along which the Metro was being constructed, for instance, miles of seven-foot-tall metal barriers protected the worksite and discouraged adventurous drivers against shortcuts through active construction zones. Each pale blue barrier segment sported Metro logos, matching stripes and bold warnings in large red letters. Exposed as they were to the erosive effects of passing traffic—caustic pollution, scouring dirt kicked up by passing cars, periodic Blueline sideswipes—they’d quickly become scratched and faded. Thus teams of painters were regularly unleashed to touch them up, reforming the logos and letters with the same precision, we realized, that had formed them to begin with. Every single letter of every single one of these thousands of barriers was hand-painted.

  In the United States, if these barriers weren’t machinepainted in the factory, they would have had printed decals affixed to them. The very last method any American factory would have engaged is hand-painting. The labor costs are far too expensive. But here in Delhi, labor was so cheap that most signage was still done by hand, from the placard on our block advertising Dr. T.’s medical practice to the post office marquee in Hauz Khas market. In a market oversupplied by labor, a squadron of sign painters is cheaper than a machine that prints decals. An old man with a bicycle cart is cheaper than a van for transporting the heavy potted plants we bought at a nursery near Okhla to our house four miles away. And an army of village women is cheaper than a crane for bringing building materials up to the tenth floor of a Gurgaon construction site, which is why single-file chains of women could always be seen marching up the steep ramps affixed to the sides of skyscrapers-to-be with piles of bricks balanced on their heads. These are terrible jobs, dangerous jobs, jobs with no career path that teach no marketable skills. But they’re jobs nonetheless, and those people filling them are probably grateful to have them at all.

  The low price of labor was made even lower by the fact that forty percent of Delhi’s workforce are migrants.2 These poor villagers spend every last rupee to reach Delhi in
hopes of a better life, even though they know they’ll have to sleep on the sidewalk on their way to achieving it. Delhi’s First City magazine ran a monthly feature called “Minute-Old Migrant” that put stories to the faces we saw every day: following failed rains or health crises, these migrants often arrived in Delhi bearing nothing but the hopes of the family relying on them. This total blank slate allows employers to lower wages even further by including food and accommodation as part of an employment package.

  That was clearly the situation at a construction site near our first flat in GK-II: during the day, we’d see an entire family filling pans from a giant dirt pile and carrying them on their heads into the building. At night, we’d see the whole family—men, women and children—sleeping atop the same pile of dirt. We also saw this across the street in Hauz Khas, where two families were rebuilding a sidewalk during the day and sleeping on it at night. We even saw this after late-night milkshakes at the Café Coffee Day lounge. We emerged from our dessert to discover that Hauz Khas market had closed up for the night, and as we walked home we saw the fruit vendors and the newspaperwallahs dragging cots and spreading bedrolls along the ground in front of their stands. One cot outside a flower stand already had two people fast asleep in it.

  Similarly, the grounds of Gurgaon’s biggest construction projects would have corrugated shanty towns to house workers and their families. And while the city is making slow progress in assuring that the most conspicuous construction sites provide sanitary facilities and childcare services,3 even those who get a cot to sleep on and nothing else know it’s probably better than the alternative. The same goes for the people sleeping on the sidewalk across from us: it beats sleeping on the side of the Ring Road. At least they’re in a safe neighborhood with night watchmen, and at least they don’t have to worry about being kicked awake by a police officer demanding payment lest he run them in for vagrancy.